MA media culture & communication

mcte module

Postmarxism

Post-Marxism and cultural studies - an agenda• Limits of Marxism in Popular Cultural Studies • Laclau and Mouffe - Discourse• Stuart Hall - Articulation• Culture as a set of practices around artefacts• Culture as a set of meaning-making practices• Meaning-making as a site for struggle and

debate

Limits of marxismA critique expanding on the limits of Marxism as a point of reference for cultural studies in terms of its:essentialismeconomismEuro-centrismand others (McRobbie, 1992)Angela McRobbie

Limits of marxism

Stuart Hall

What marxism leaves out as a tool in critical cultural studies:Culture (!)IdeologyLanguageThe symbolic

Other issues which fix its mode of thought in criticalcultural studies:OrthodoxyDoctrinal characterDeterminismReductionismIts immutable law of history

Laclau & MouffeCollaboration between Marxism and more recent emancipatory struggles

Shift from emphasis on ideology to emphasis on discourse: conceived as both language and meaningful action: the metaphor of the brick in the wall

Meanings are articulated with language and social practice through discourse

Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe:

Hegemony and Socialist Strategy

Hegemony - recap“the normal exercise of hegemony … is characterised by the combination of force and consent”

Resistance is possible; but it is continually ‘incorporated’ or as Laclau and Mouffe would argue: different visions have their potential antagonism neutralised

Hegemony – profoundly ambiguous in its applications in Cultural Studies

Antonio Gramsci

Stuart Hall - Articulation

Objects have tobe articulated to achieve meaning

The “text” and the discourse around it is the act of articulating and meaning making

Encoding/decoding - the gap between the producer and the reader

Culture as a set of practices

Interpretation means “doing work” on the object to make meaning

Materiality and culture

The world exists in a material sense outside culture but is only made to mean within culture

Struggle and debate

Meaning-making is always a site for struggle and debate

Your videos:

Discourse (as language, text and social action)Merger of Marxist and other emancipatory theories?Hegemony (can we distinguish between ‘dominant’ and ‘subordinate’ groups? What is being negotiated?)Culture – how do the categories we’ve seen so far apply?